The San Francisco Examiner is improving, there can be no debate about it. New editor Dave Burgin has added a host of new features, making the paper a cleaner, livelier read.

But the changes aren't coming easily. Burgin has stepped on more than a few toes, firing some reporters and intimidating others, and the Newspaper Guild is continuing efforts to unionize the paper.

Burgin, of course, didn't want to talk about any of that. Most of what he said to me in a recent interview was off the record, and I couldn't print it in a family newspaper anyway.

As for firing people -- and he has canned at least two reporters after his widely publicized dumping of Managing Editor Robert Porterfield -- Burgin said, "Oh, come on. I've hired 27 people."

Sources say some of Burgin's antics have spurred the union activity. However, Carl Hall, president of the Northern California Media Workers Guild (and a Chronicle staff writer), said his union has been in talks with Examiner owner Ted Fang since before Fang took over operation of the paper in November.

"Our local started at the Examiner," Hall said. "For 100 years, it's been a union paper. . . . To let the founding union newspaper go nonunion is not acceptable."

Hall said talks have been amicable so far, and he did not criticize Fang. He said the union could offer employees better pay and working conditions and, most importantly, a grievance procedure. "Every employee deserves a defense," he said.

Fang said he is meeting with the Guild and is open to the idea of a union shop. "That's the employees' decision," he said.

Fang also defended a recent move to stop delivering thousands of copies of his San Francisco Independent on Saturdays. Although he did not give specific numbers, he said the Saturday Independent is now distributed only on news racks and as an insert into the Sunday Examiner. "It is less copies, but it's for a different readership," he said. "We think it's a stronger readership. And advertisers are supportive."

He said the Examiner is "losing some (readers) here and gaining some there. " He is in talks with the Audit Bureau of Circulation and hopes to get a special audit so he can sell advertisers on a specific readership number.

Meanwhile, Burgin has added some new editorial features, many of them tricks from his old playbook. The industry veteran has put a daily Q&A column on the front page and a Herb Caen imitator on Page 2.

Burgin has also called on some of his old contacts, including the legendary Hunter S. Thompson and retired Sports Illustrated writer Ron Fimrite, to contribute to the paper. Fimrite said he has been pals with Burgin since the 1960s, when Fimrite was a Chronicle sports columnist and Burgin was the Examiner's sports editor. "He's always been colorful and very creative," Fimrite said. (For more on Burgin, I recommend an excellent profile in this month's San Francisco magazine, and not just because it contains an unflattering mention of yours truly.)

Aside from whatever hurdles the paper is trying to overcome, Burgin has his own problems as well. He is being sued in San Francisco Superior Court by Laurence J. Hyman.

Hyman's the guy who once owned Woodford Publishing, but sold it to Burgin and David Ross in 1998. Woodford produced things like the programs for the San Francisco 49ers. Hyman claims Burgin and Ross assumed a certain amount of debt,

and they made payments to him until last April, when they defaulted.

When it looked as if bankruptcy was looming for Woodford, Hyman sued, charging breach of contract and claiming Burgin and Ross owe him $722,692.

I wanted to ask Burgin if that's why he had to take the job at the Examiner,

but when I brought up the lawsuit, he hung up on me.

REHASHED SUSHI: The Examiner has figured out one innovative way to get ads: Take those that The Chronicle won't run.

The Chronicle turned down an ad from actor Don Johnson, who was critical of a column by Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross about a police investigation into his alleged advances on a woman in a San Francisco sushi bar last month.

Chronicle executives said the ad contained factual inaccuracies and asked Johnson's representatives to edit it. But Johnson's people instead asked for their $18,000 back and pulled the ad.

That ad will run in the Examiner tomorrow, according to a report in the Ex yesterday.

Meanwhile, some ads that once were the Examiner's domain are now coming over to The Chronicle. Most of the city of San Francisco's legal ads run in the San Francisco Independent, to the tune of an estimated $917,670 in the last fiscal year, according to the city purchasing office.

But a relative handful of legal ads -- amounting to $23,860 last year -- are required to run in a paper that's printed in San Francisco. That used to be the Examiner, when it was owned by the Hearst Corp. But the Examiner no longer is printed in San Francisco -- so The Chronicle picks up the ads.

PUNTO-COM: In November, I wrote about a deal that the Industry Standard backed out of, involving a Miami company called Punto-com. One factor in the deal hitting the rocks: a background check that tied a Punto-com exec to an old murder accusation in Colombia.

It was a tough story to write because it seemed that the exec probably had nothing to do with the killing. The fact that it came up and played a role in killing the deal was newsworthy -- but by publicizing it, I also risked the unintended consequence of hurting the company and the exec's reputation.

During the intervening months, however, I have received new information. The prosecutor general of Colombia -- a position equivalent to U.S. attorney general -- responded to my inquiry by saying the executive, Isaac Lee, had been cleared in its investigation. (The accusation against Lee had been leveled by a journalist who the prosecutor-general's office said had been charged with libel in another case.)

And Punto-com -- which aims to become an Industry Standard of sorts for Latin America, producing a magazine and Web site to cover the region's Internet industry -- is surviving. In December, Punto-com said it had raised $9.3 million in private equity financing from Citicorp Venture Capital, Glacier Internet Holdings, Bank of America, Grupo Editorial Expansion, and a Spanish venture capital firm, LatinRim.

One can assume those banks conducted background checks and were satisfied with the results.

UPSIDE DOWNSIZES: It was only last month when Upside Media laid off four people from its online unit. This week, the San Francisco company laid off six people from its flagship magazine. And Upside put off a staff retreat to Cabo San Lucas.

"Big deal," Upside CEO David Bunnell said in an e-mail. "We'll do these things again when the market starts coming back. The important thing is that we are staying viable and weathering this storm. No one likes laying off people, but I'm not shy about doing the things we need to do to stay out of trouble and stay competitive, which we are definitely doing."

Upside is the oldest of the so-called new-economy magazines and the one that many pundits think is least likely to survive an industry shakeout.

But Bunnell is a wily veteran, and he's pouring money into an Internet radio venture, UpsideFN.com. He boasts that Upside is growing a business while other Web media firms are shrinking.

SIGN OF THE TIMES: Dot-coms are down, and so is the Industry Standard, one of their main chroniclers. But you don't have to know the Standard is following the dot-com lead in laying off its staff. You only have to look where its billboard used to give up-to-the-minute news on the Internet economy,

over by the Bay Bridge.

Good thing they took it down, though. If people could still read Internet news while in traffic, maybe more than dot-coms would crash.